Update 2026-08-30: a third-party video about this record was removed, and the correction that has to come with it

This one is about someone else. A video that covered the findings in this repository has been removed from YouTube following a copyright removal request naming the claimant in the dispute I am party to. That is convenient for me to report, which is exactly why the correction comes first and the removal comes second.

I am not a party to that removal. I was not consulted about the video before it was published, I have never spoken to its author, and nothing below is his account of anything. Everything here is either quoted from an archived page, read out of a public repository, or stated as an inference in the sentence that makes it.

1. The correction, first

The video is “A Huge WoW Addon Put Malware On Players’ PCs”, Bellular Warcraft, uploaded 2026-07-29T14:20:11-07:00, 1349 seconds. On 2026-08-29T21:50:14Z its author posted publicly about the removal and restated the characterisation: “Gnome Sequencer people copyright struck us for reporting on them literally smuggling malware onto peoples computers.”

This repository does not support that characterisation, and did not support it on the day the video was published. Three things were already true on 2026-07-29:

Since then, on 2026-08-27, CurseForge re-examined the copyright claim against GRIP-EMS and closed it on the merits, recorded in UPDATE-2026-08-27-curseforge-closes-the-claim.md, with the standing caveat that a platform closing a claim under its own policy is not a legal ruling.

I record this because the correction does not become less true when the person who needs to hear it has just been on the receiving end of a copyright claim. If a follow-up repeats the original framing, it will be repeating something this repository had already withdrawn or superseded before the original went up.

2. The removal, and what the notice actually says

The page was archived on 2026-08-30 at 15:45:23 UTC:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260830154523/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u37h_2yliyY

In that capture playabilityStatus.status reads ERROR, and the notice is carried as two separate fields, quoted here exactly as they appear:

Field Value
title.content Video unavailable
description.content It was removed following a copyright removal request by Larry Thiessen (ScaryLarryGames / GSE United)

The description carries no trailing full stop. Anyone quoting it as one sentence ending in a period is paraphrasing.

Reproduction. The notice lives inside ytInitialData, under playabilityStatus.errorScreen.playerInterstitialRenderer.content.interstitialViewModel. It is not in the rendered text, so a text extraction of that page returns nothing and a check that only asserts the page exists proves nothing about what it says. Fetch the capture with the Wayback id_ modifier and search the response body for Thiessen.

3. The window, bounded by four dated observations

Observation When Source
Page live, 79,299 views 2026-08-04T21:28:32Z Wayback capture 20260804212832
Page live, 85,937 views 2026-08-23T13:53:39Z Wayback capture 20260823135339
Author posts about the removal 2026-08-29T21:50:14Z the post itself
Page archived in the removed state 2026-08-30T15:45:23Z Wayback capture 20260830154523

So the removal falls after 2026-08-23T13:53:39Z and at or before 2026-08-29T21:50:14Z. That is a six-day window and it is as tight as the evidence goes.

4. The claimant’s own folder reference, and what it does not show

A file in the claimant’s public repository cites a path on his own machine: C:\Git\Image-Vault\dmca-u37h_2yliyY\TIMESTAMPS.md. That is the video’s ID, in a folder named for a DMCA. It was introduced in commit f64d2fa, authored 2026-08-26 19:53:25 -0500, which is 2026-08-27T00:53:25Z.

What this does not show. That timestamp sits inside the six-day window in section 3. It therefore cannot be shown to predate the removal, and I am not asserting that it does. An earlier working note of mine measured this against the day I discovered the removal rather than the day the removal happened, which produced a stronger claim than the evidence carries. That claim is withdrawn here, not quietly dropped.

Both commits are archived as plain-text patches, which capture the diff and the git authorship header; the rendered GitHub pages do not, because the diff is loaded lazily:

5. Two other videos, now archived

This repository cites https://youtu.be/2Lwqu93TiFY as video discussion. A sibling video on the same subject has now been removed, so that citation was one claim away from being a dead link with nothing behind it. It is archived:

Archiving a source is not an endorsement of it. Both of these state positions I disagree with in places, which is the ordinary reason to preserve a source, not a reason to skip it.

6. What I could not verify

7. Nothing in this changes the findings above

The Companion findings stand where UPDATE-2026-08-26-platform-actions-and-current-builds.md left them, measured through 0.5.3. Nothing in this update is evidence about the shipped application, and none of it should be read as such. It is here because a video about this record was removed, and because the record should say plainly what it does and does not support before anyone else characterises it.